Besides the obvious “welcome to [state name]” sign. Is there a significant change in architecture, infrastructure, agriculture, store brands, maybe even culture?
The Missouri-Illinois border is the Mississippi river. Hard to accidentally cross it.
Edit: I take that back. I wasn’t accounting for the crazy interchanges in St. Louis right before and after the three bridges that cross near downtown. So you have all the local traffic and exits for downtown piled up with local and interatate traffic crossing the bridges. People love it.
Roads. It is pretty common around where I grew up to notice you are in a different states when there is a sudden shift in road conditions. They never communicated about when to do repairs or anything, so it was almost always an obvious line between either a really shit road and a smooth one, or vice versa. Sometimes you could even tell based on the noise or feel of the road, if the other state uses different road construction materials.
field on one side, field on the other. if I am on the interstate, the surface gets really shitty on our side because brownback and the republicans in topeka drained the highway fund to give the koch bros and fat corpo-farmers a tax break.
Yeah, the roads instantly change color and texture. If you cross into south carolina, BAM. All the roads are whiter and rougher.
I mean, thats kinda exactly what happens when you go from German highway to Czech highway
Everything just instantly gets yellow and dusty
Yes! Texas/Colorado for sure, and Texas/Louisiana IIRC are noticable changes, but I can’t remember if the change happens right at the border or not. Texas is big enough that we get different road types in different regions, like different asphalts near the coast vs the desert, or sometimes per county too. In retrospect it’s super obvious. Awesome comment 😁
Something that surprised me in my travels (which are primarily West of the Mississippi) is how often the states actually line up with a significant geologic shift. Arizona is endless orange desert. New Mexico immediately becomes rainbow painted cliffs. Utah is somehow entirely vertical. California is a contradiction of green desert. Nevada is like a chemical mine puked on a bunch of bumpy ridges. Northern New Mexico falls off a cliff and the bottom is Texas.
If you watch closely, usually something fairly dramatic happens in the landscape within a few miles of the border.
Drove from ohio to the PNW and yeah you’ve got some state boundaries that are minor like ohio-indiana (but even then there’s a vibe shift between bumfuck ohio and bumfuck indiana). But Illinois is very different. Once you cross the Mississippi it’s a whole lot of nothing but corn in Iowa. Minnesota was a beautiful detour and a much needed respite between Iowa and south Dakota.
Ohio is weird, it’s Midwestern farms, great lakes, the ohio river valley, and Appalachian foothills. So there’s more difference between Columbus and Cleveland than between Cleveland and Michigan. But going south you cross the ohio and the valley opens into a more mountainous terrain rather than the flatness of ohio. Similarly west Virginia is a river then suddenly mountains. Pennsylvania just feels different (tbh the ohio-Pennsylvania border is out of the way unless you live in Cleveland or have frequent reason to drive to the east coast)
There are 50 states and a lot of different border arrangements. If a border is something dramatic like a river and you know that’s the state border you can tell.
Often the only way to tell is a change in road surface or signage, or the “Welcome to state” sign. Google navigation will tell you too.
Yeah most often the road gets worse /better, either because one state does a better job with road maintenance, or they’re just on different schedules.
Also sometimes the signage for state routes changes slightly.
Between States with more or less lax laws on liquor, firearms, explosives, tobacco, etc, there’s usually various merchants immediately on the side of the border with more lax laws.
Don’t forget weed! Happens with Wisconsin and basically every state that borders it.
I live on a border and my jogging path cuts through one state and then rounds back home to the other. The only way you can tell a difference is the states have different paving and road work schedules, so usually one state has more shitty roads then the other.
Canadian here, never crossed into the U.S nor seen the border but at some point in time I drove down 0 Avenue and saw a house with an American flag and my instinct was “That’s the wrong country chief” but I was far wrong.
Really put into perspective how “secure” our borders are.
I grew up in Illinois, about an hour northwest of Chicago. As soon as you cross into Wisconsin or Indiana there are fireworks stores EVERYWHERE! And as of a few years ago, Illinois has returned the favor with dispories on its side of the border.
Also as soon as you cross into Indiana, you’re bombarded with billboards for “gentlemen’s” clubs and ones saying “Hell is Real” and the like.
Crossing into Wisconsin, it never took long to leave the flatness of Illinois behind to have it replaced by the state’s rolling hills. You’d also stop seeing businesses with “Chicagoland” in the name once you were north of the border. You do see that in parts of northwest Indiana though
Heading west out of Connecticut into New York the most obvious difference is they don’t trim tree branches over the road/power lines. It suddenly feels like you’re driving through a tunnel of green. Its actually quite nice but those parts of nys must have a lot of outages after storms.
A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have. Though, there’s a fair amount of aerial hardware as well. Where I live is famous for ice storms, and every few years there’s a major outage that lasts anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. They’re rare, but they do occur. More often it’s because someone hit a pole or ground mount transformer, versus a falling branch or lightning bolt.
I still prefer ice, snow, and occasional outages to unbearable heat and humidity, earthquake, and hurricane tradeoff being further south or west.
To answer OP, there’s a visible change in road surface and signage not only at state borders, but even between county and town lines. Each county handles the road a different way, and the finish/quality can differ a LOT even between municipalities and counties.
A lot of our residential infrastructure is underground, because of the weather we have.
I get that. A lot of ours is too. But I live an hour from the area I’m talking about, the weather isn’t that different, and I still see wire poles up there waiting to be taken down by a tree branch in the next ice storm. CTs trees tend to be pruned so they don’t overhang the roads at all. Its the most jarring difference driving from, for example, Sherman CT to Pawling NY.
The roads go to absolute shit crossing from Ohio into Indiana. And it’s not like we have exactly great roads here…
Agreed, but indiana roads are so much louder too. Its kinda baffling.
Because they go through the door in the border wall to Mexico.
I used to live near Cincinnati. You don’t go to Kentucky by accident. The largest tributary of the Mississippi was in the way and all thats waiting for you is Kentucky. Also the traffic sucked
I can tell when I’m driving from NY into CT when suddenly there’s traffic for no reason and everybody is driving like an asshat.
